This can't be a thing.
Her voice, in my head, from the edge of the bed at six in the morning. Clear, sure, and reasonable, and I'd said okay because she was right. Astrid and Easton were going to be in our lives for years. Birthdays, babies, Christmas at the bungalow. A one-night stand between the maid of honor and the best man was a thing two adults could file away and move past, as long as neither of them made it into something it wasn't.
I'd agreed. I'd meant it.
I was standing at the end of a hospital corridor, wanting to walk down it for a woman I'd agreed not to want, and the wanting was louder than any agreement I'd made.
I'd never wanted to walk down a hall for anyone before. That was the part that kept landing. A decade of casual, a decade of women I liked and let go without effort, and not once in any of those years had I stood in a corridor and fought with myself about whether to say hello. The fact that I was fighting meant something. I didn't know what it meant yet, but it was not the nothing I'd agreed to call it.
She turned a corner and disappeared.
I went back to the rig.
Saturday evening, my mother's kitchen smelled like roast chicken, rosemary, and the particular warmth of a room that had been cooking since three in the afternoon. The table was set for six. Henry's high chair was pulled up between Caroline and the empty seat that would be mine once I stopped leaning against the counter pretending I wasn't stealing a piece of bread from the cutting board.
"Duke Anthony Rhodes, if you touch that bread before we sit down."
"I'm not touching the bread."
My mother turned from the stove with a serving spoon and a look that had been settling arguments in the Rhodes household for thirty-two years. I put the bread down. Reese, at the table with her phone, laughed without looking up.
"He always does this," Reese said.
"He has always done this," my mother confirmed. "Since he was four."
"I was hungry when I was four."
"You're hungry now. Sit down."
I sat down.
My father came in from the living room. Ray Rhodes, early sixties, big man, big voice, the whistle from Hartsdale High's sideline still audible in how he called the room to order even when the room was his own kitchen. He took the head of the table. Caroline was already seated, Henry on her hip, working a sippy cup into the high chair's tray with one hand while holding her son with the other.
My mother brought the chicken. My father carved. Reese quickly put her phone away because my mom, Diane Rhodes,didn't allow phones at the table, and Reese had been testing that boundary for a decade without success. Caroline got Henry settled, and I poured the water. The choreography was automatic—six people in a kitchen they had been eating in together for thirty-odd years, moving around each other without thinking about it.
"So," my dad said. He had a fork in one hand and the expression he wore when he was about to be proud of somebody. "Nepal."
"What about it?"
"The training. How's it going? You still doing the elevation runs?"
"Every other weekend. Did Mount Washington last month."
"Mount Washington." He nodded with the slow satisfaction of a man who had been tracking his son's accomplishments since pee-wee football and had never run out of room on the refrigerator. "That's serious elevation."
"It's a good test. The summit altitude isn't the problem—it's how your body handles the oxygen debt on the way up."
"When do you hear about the expedition roster?"
"Few months. They're putting the final team together in the fall."
"My son," he said to the table—the same easy, proprietary pride he carried into every room, a man who had never doubted that the highlight reel would keep going. "Climbing in the Himalayas."
Reese looked at me across the table. "Are you bringing back something for Henry?"
"I'll bring back a yak."
Caroline, cutting Henry's chicken into pieces the size of her thumbnail, didn't look up. "Henry doesn’t need a yak."
